No.47 Seminar ： How to Build a Supertree
- Jesper Jansson (The Hakubi Center for Advanced Research)
- 2012/10/02 4:00pm
- The Hakubi Center for advanced research (iCeMS West Wing 2F, Seminar Room)
- English
Summary
A more than 150-year-old data structure known as a “phylogenetic tree” can be used to describe the evolutionary history of a given set of related objects such as biological species, proteins, natural languages, spam e-mail messages, etc. Over the years, many alternative phylogenetic trees have been constructed and published, but for various reasons, these trees do not always agree with each other. Therefore, a current research trend in Bioinformatics is to develop general methods for merging an existing collection of (possibly conflicting) phylogenetic trees into a single “supertree” while keeping as much branching information as possible. In this talk, I will describe some of my recent work on how to construct a phylogenetic supertree from so-called “rooted triplets” (small phylogenetic trees with exactly three leaves each) and discuss connections to Computational complexity theory.